I Fucking Love Sociology

Hi there! Credit to Elise Andrew for being an inspiration.

[ifuckinglovesociology]

While many of us have little difficulty assessing our own victimization within some major system of oppression, whether it be by race, social class, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age or gender, we typically fail to see how our thoughts and actions uphold someone else’s subordination.

Patricia Hill Collins (via ifuckinglovesociology)

[ifuckinglovesociology]

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

Marx. German Ideology. (via ifuckinglovesociology)

[ifuckinglovesociology]

A discourse of meritocracy enables the wealthy to attribute their success to personalized attributes such as “effort” and “ability” rather than having to evoke structural issues such as class standing.

Chua, V. (2011). Social networks and labor market outcomes in a meritocracy. Social networks, 33, 1-11. (via ifuckinglovesociology)

[ifuckinglovesociology]

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Clifford Geertz, 1973:5 (via ifuckinglovesociology)

[ifuckinglovesociology]

Who Gets to Graduate?

To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.

If you want to help low-income students succeed, it’s not enough to deal with their academic and financial obstacles. You also need to address their doubts and misconceptions and fears.

[ifuckinglovesociology]

It is patently obvious that all education consists of a continual effort to impose upon the child ways of seeing, thinking and acting which he himself would not have arrived at spontaneously.

Durkheim. The rules of sociological method. (via ifuckinglovesociology)

[ifuckinglovesociology]

As a means of social control, humor may function to express approval or disapproval of social form and action, express common group sentiments, develop and perpetuate stereotypes, relieve awkward or tense situations, and express collective, sub-rosa approbation of action not explicitly approved. Humor as expressed in the controlled laugh or smile may serve as a means of communication, signaling the intent and nature of communicating parties (Stephenson, 1951:570)

Stephenson, R. M. “Conflict and Control Functions of Humor.” American Journal of Sociology56 (1951), 569-74. (via ifuckinglovesociology)

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Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Wealth Gap (HBO)

If American wealth is a lottery, we are increasingly playing two different games.

[ifuckinglovesociology]

The continuity of social structure is itself produced by myriad individual decisions and actions. Most people who decide whether or not to take a school exam or aim for promotion for work are not consciously reproducing the class system: they are doing what seems best to them at the time. Similarly most people lighting up a cigarette or going out jogging are not aiming to reproduce the pattern of health inequality.

Bartley, M., Blane, D., & Smith, G. D. Introduction: Beyond the Black Report. Sociology of Health & Illness, 20(5), 563-77. (via ifuckinglovesociology)

[ifuckinglovesociology]

A culture is not a unified system that pushes action in a consistent direction. It is more like a ‘tool kit’ or repertoire from which actors select differing pieces for constructing lines of action.

Ann Swidler, 1986, p. 277 (via ifuckinglovesociology)

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So this movement is a young people’s movement. It is a Hong Kong young people’s movement and this is our future. If the government won’t give us true universal suffrage, they will have to deal with these young people for the next 30 years.

This city cannot be so poor that we only have money left. A city needs a conscience and people need a sense of justice.

~Jimmy Lai

[ifuckinglovesociology]

Freedom is not merely the chance to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them - and then, the opportunity to choose. That is why freedom cannot exist without an enlarged role of human reason in human affairs. Within an individual’s biography and within a society’s history, the social task of reason is to formulate choices, to enlarge the scope of human decisions in the making of history. The future of human affairs is not merely some set of variables to be predicted. The future is what is to be decided - within the limits, to be sure, of historical possibility. But this possibility is not fixed; in our time the limits seem very broad indeed.

Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. (via ifuckinglovesociology)

[ifuckinglovesociology]

Conflict produces solidarity. This is a well-known sociological principle (Coser, 1956); but it needs the proviso: as long as the bandwagon effect is on its upward swing, which is to say, as long as it appears that your coalition is growing and will be victorious. When the weakness of the coalition is publicly demonstrated and it appears that a rival coalition will be the victor, solidarity ebbs away.

Collins, R. (2001). Weber and the Sociology of Revolution. Journal of Classical Sociology, 1(2): 171-194. (via ifuckinglovesociology)

[ifuckinglovesociology]

… I claim that in the 1980s and 1990s a trend intensified that is indeed intrinsic to the logic and operation of capitalism. Karl Marx (1977) described this trend as mystification, while more recently Jameson (1991, 18) interpreted it as the generalization of exchange value to the point at which “the very memory of use value is effaced.” In the mid-1980s, management theorists began suggesting that it was more lucrative to produce brands than actual tangible commodities. Since then, a growing number of manufacturers have switched to buying products and branding them, as opposed to producing goods and advertising them (Holt 2004; Klein 2000). In this condition, consumers increasingly choose certain commodities over others not because they believe that they offer better use values, but because they more compellingly express the lifestyles with which the buyers identify. In other words, practices of branding draw on an understanding that identity is nothing more than an attitude in a world in which only affective commitments matter (Grossberg 1989). Ueno Chizuko (1992) compellingly captures the logic of our growing indifference toward the use value of commodities. She muses on the strangeness of the situation when a shop attendant turns to ask her what she is looking for. She highlights the absurdity of the question, as the only true answer is, “I’m looking for myself.”

Gabriella Lukacs. “Intimate Televisuality: Television Dramas and the Tarento in Postwar Japan” (pp. 29-57), in Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan. Duke University Press, 2010. (via ifuckinglovesociology)

[ifuckinglovesociology]

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man’s labour-power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.

Lenin, 1913. The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism. (via ifuckinglovesociology)

[ifuckinglovesociology]

… Education sets out precisely with the object of creating a social being. Thus there can be seen, as in an abbreviated form, how the social being has been fashioned historically. The pressure to which the child is subjected unremittingly is the same pressure of the social environment which seeks to shape him in its own image, and in which parents and teachers are only the representatives and intermediaries.

Durkheim. Rules of Sociological Method. (via ifuckinglovesociology)

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Ha-Joon Chang: Economics Is A Political Argument

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"I am seeking to debunk this widespread view, propagated by the current generation of economists, that somehow you can neatly separate economics from politics."

"Economics is not a way of thinking like being rational and maximizing your monetary gain in all your actions. Economics should be defined in terms of what it is about. It should be about how people produce things, how people exchange them, how people earn income, how they pay taxes, how the government provides infrastructure with tax revenue and how it conducts monetary policy. The subject has to be defined in terms of the object of inquiry (rather than the methodology)".

"So I challenge my students to tell me one economic theory, Neo-Classical or Marxist or whatever, that can explain Singapore’s success. There is no such theory because Singaporean reality combines extreme elements of capitalism and socialism. The point that I’m trying to make as an example is that all theories are partial.The Classical school or Marxist school focuses more on production than exchanges, in contrast to the Neo-Classical school. They make different assumptions, and they are interested in different issues. They all have their weakness and strengths. In recognition of the fact that the real world is very complex, we need to teach our students and the general public that there are different ways of understanding the economy."

"It is terrible that students these days are taught there is only one flavor of ice cream, when there are 9 or 10 different ones. At least, let them taste them all, and if they conclude that neoclassical is the best, then so be it. But you have to at least tell them that there are all other kinds of theories. Otherwise, it’s like North Korea. They’re not told that there are other types of society because the information is blocked."